- Lived:
- Born February 24, 1956, Cleveland, Ohio · lives and works in Berkeley, California
- Tradition:
- Continental philosophy; feminist, queer, and political theory
- The Big Idea:
- Gender is not an inner essence you express but something built up out of repeated acts — and the deeper question underneath is who gets counted as fully human at all.
- In their words:
- "Gender is a kind of doing."
- If you remember one thing:
- Butler took Beauvoir's line that one is not born a woman and pushed it all the way: the categories we treat as natural are made — and what is made can be remade.